Grafana ❤️🔥 Tempo ❤️🔥 OTel: Practical distributed tracing from the field (Feb 2026 Community Call)
Ever wondered what actually happens when a request travels through a chain of services, and how to debug it when something breaks? In this episode, we sit down with field engineers who onboard customers and solve real tracing problems every day. It’s practical, opinionated, and grounded in real-world experience. What we cover: - Distributed tracing basics, with a live demo of services talking to each other using Tempo - How to enable tracing with OpenTelemetry and what you get out of the box - How to use traces in practice: debugging flows, service graphs, SLIs, and alerting - Cost control strategies that scale: head and tail-based sampling - Using tracing together with metrics, logs, and profiles 💬 A great opportunity to ask questions and learn from the field. TIMESTAMPS 00:00:00 Introductions to the February community call 00:02:30 Overview of the joint call between the OTel and tempo communities 00:05:15 Explanation of distributed tracing 00:10:00 Visual representation of how a trace works 00:20:30 Discussion on metrics and logs vs. traces 00:25:45 Introduction to OpenTelemetry and its significance 00:32:15 Overview of trace collection backends and Tempo 00:40:00 Explanation of sampling (head sampling and tail sampling) 00:50:30 Discussion on instrumentation types: zero code, auto, manual, and hybrid 01:00:00 Wrap-up and invitation for future community calls ----- ☁️ Grafana Cloud is the easiest way to get started with Grafana dashboards, metrics, logs, traces, and profiles. Our forever-free tier includes access to 10k metrics, 50GB logs, 50GB traces and more. Sign up: https://grafana.com/get/?src=yt&mdm=social&cnt=description ❓ Have a question that isn't related to this video? Check out the Official Grafana Community Forums: https://community.grafana.com/?src=yt&mdm=social&cnt=description ----- 👍 If you found this video useful, be sure to give it a thumbs up and subscribe to our channel for more helpful Grafana videos. 📱 Follow us for the latest and greatest on all things Grafana and our other OSS projects. X: (https://www.twitter.com/grafana) LinkedIn: (https://www.linkedin.com/company/grafana-labs/) Facebook: (https://www.facebook.com/grafana) #Grafana #Observability